Figure

A series of 50 unique silkscreens: each figure is a selfportrait of the artist. His head is represented from the front or from the back, showing and hiding the artist identity.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Glenn Ligon: Figure/ Paysage/Marine, October 21 – December 6, 2008, Yvon Lambert Gallery, Paris.

Glenn Ligon (born in 1960) belongs to a generation of artists who came to prominence in the late 1980s on the strength of conceptually based paintings and phototext works, investigating the social, linguistic, and political constructions of races, gender and sexuality. Informed by his experiences as an African American and as a gay man living in the United States, his art is a sustained meditation on issues of quotation, the presence of the past in the present, and the representation of self in relation to culture and history. It incorporates sources as diverse as James Baldwin's literary texts, Martin Luther King's speeches, and Richard Pryor's stand-up comedy routines. The development of ideas around artmaking is central to his aspirations as an artist, both as the conceptual underpinning for his art and as a critique of the society in which we live.

Glenn Ligon has exhibited in numerous institutions around the world. Lately, the exhibition Some Changes presented a large retrospective of his work, it travelled from the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery of Toronto in 2005, to the Houston Contemporary Arts Museum, the Andy Warhol Museum of Pittsburgh in 2006, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Colombus and the Mudam, Musée d'Art Moderne de Luxembourg, in 2007.